In this series of tutorials you will learn how to use Canva, highly popular web service among social media users and graphic design enthusiasts.
Starting with new design
When you login on Canva you are presented with Home page.
On the right top of the page there are few options for you like search, help and settings buttons, profile button and “Create a design” button.
Click on “Create a design” button.
First two options you can choose are “+ Custom size” and “Start with an image”.
Below are suggested options. There are many suggested options to choose from like Poster, Infographic, Instagram Post, Logo, Video etc.
But this is only a part of everything Canva offers.
If you scroll down the suggested options you can see there are no Twitter templates. Now type Twitter in search box at the top of drop down menu. Voila! You are offered with many Twitter related templates.
Click on Quote Twitter Post.
Now you are in edit design mode. On the left side are templates you can use to start with or you can begin from scratch.
Some templates are paid some are free. Hover with mouse over template thumbnail and if template is free you will see “free” text on the bottom right side of the thumbnail image.
Click on the template and begin editing.
You can edit every element of the template.
Basic Text Editing
From the left side menu click on Text button and than choose “Add a heading”, “Add a subheading” or “Add a little bit of body text”. As an alternative you can just press letter T on your keyboard. You will get dummy “Your paragraph text”.
Above canvas is top menu with basic editing options for text. Text must be selected for menu to be visible.
These are standard options when working with text. You can choose font, size of the font and color.
You can turn your letters to uppercase and lowercase.
You can align text left, right, centered and justify.
You can make a list with numbers and dots and adjust spacing for letters and line height.
One more useful option you have is effects.
You have several effects to apply to your text: shadow, lift, hollow, splice, echo, glitch, neon and curve.
Each of these effects have their own adjustable parameters. For example if you use shadow effect you can set offset, direction, blur, tarnsparency and color. For lift effect you can set intensity. Same for other effects.
You can move, rotate and scale your text box by moving handles and using rotate and move buttons below text box.
Advanced tip: Place your mouse pointer away from text box but on the canvas and press alt on keyboard (Win). You will get text box position in relation to edges.
Scaling and cropping
From the main left menu click on Photos button and than click any free image to place it on canvas.
There are two different kind of handles, scale handles and crop handles. Scale handles are the ones in corners (circles) and crop handles are the ones in the middle of edges (rectangles).
By using scale handles image is scaled towards the opposite corner.
By using scale handles with ALT keyboard key (Windows) image is scaled towards image center.
By using crop handles images is cropped from the same side, but if you press ALT keyboard key (Windows) image is cropped from the same and opposite side at the same time.
Very handy, right?
If you try to scale the image outside of canvas it will not be visible.
You can also select crop option from the top menu (first select image).
In this mode only visible part of the image is clear, while hidden part is blurred.
You can move image around, crop it or scale it. Click inside image to move it.
When you are finished click Done button on top menu to exit this mode.
to be continued ...
all images made by me, screenshots of Canva UI
this post was first published on my wp blog